


Bloodstains and Pavement

by CloudDreamer



Series: Portraits of Monsters [1]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, In-Universe True Crime, Vague Lesbian Pining, polaroids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:35:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21965779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: In which a voyeuristic photographer encounters an urban legend and receives a job offer, of the sort you don’t refuse.
Series: Portraits of Monsters [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1583266
Kudos: 19





	Bloodstains and Pavement

She sits on the edge of the ledge above the scene of a, her vintage Polaroid camera held loosely in her hands. With the strength and flight of Alexandria, she doesn’t worry about things like height.

It’s a massacre worthy of the Slaughterhouse Nine, the photographer thinks, but only in terms of ruthlessness. 

She’s seen the Nine's remains time and time again. For years now, she's been on their trail. In their wake, they leave bodies and road blocks, heroes and villains alike too beaten and too broken to ever tell her what she wants to know. Always something big, always something flashy. Never boring, but a pain in the ass to get the details on.

This right here is something else. It's not a performance. It's precise. Efficient.

Just a woman, dressed for a business meeting, annihilating a handful of mercenaries protecting a terrified cape in the car park of the Denny’s she’d stopped in for breakfast. 

Without Eris’s conflict sense, she would never have noticed anything was wrong. As old and battered as the picture from Colorado is, it‘s still her most reliable source of cape tracking. 

And without Alexandria’s speed, she never would’ve found her in time. That’s one of her favorite picture. She guards that one carefully. She nearly died for it. Twice.

It's not like she couldn't have printed something out from online. A shitty approximation. She'd seen Alexandria in person before. It was such a beautiful, dizzying moment. She gets nauseous just thinking of that iron will, how monstrous the world's foremost hero is. She wants to laugh with joy at the memory. The photographer wonders how many people in the world know how Alexandria's warm breath smells. The Siberian must.

Trigger events happen when people are at their worst, but the photographer thinks of that as her _best_ moment. Were those tears of joy? Of pain? Of longing?

The photographer isn't crazy, no matter what they say. She's not dumb, and she's not reckless. She's _smart_ , with her thorough research and notes. So many notes. She's read all the stories, memorized most of the wiki articles, and she's not crazy to go after the monsters like this. What's crazy is the idiots who want to fight them.

The woman doesn’t stay still for long enough for the photographer to catch her, either in a picture or in her mind's eye. Even once they’re all dead or passed out, she hurries to clean the scene with an efficiency that certainly doesn’t remind her of the Nine. They don’t pretty things up afterwards.

She starts to consider the possibility she might’ve stumbled into the Boogeyman by accident when the woman turns her attention upwards.

“Camera down.”

The photographer considers, feet digging into the rubble tighter. What will she do if she doesn't obey? Hurt her? Break her? Her heart rate speeds up, and her lips curve into a smile.

“I train with the real Alexandria. Killing or maiming an imitation would not be a difficult task.”

She nods and lets it fall slack against her chest. The real Alexandria... Effervescent's power says she's not lying. The photographer realizes she's breathing heavily at the idea of seeing her for a third time. More pictures. More details. Memorizing every inch of her gray brutality.

Even the photographer doesn't know much about the Boogeyman, if she is that particular myth, and that's saying something. The first time she even heard them referenced, she'd been merged to the floor with Sliver's power, listening in on a cape who hadn't ever gotten around to picking his name warning his girlfriend about the dangers of dating a parahuman. They'd been in bed together, and it'd been totally cute. She still remembers the look on his face when he realized she was there. God, that was embarrassing. She hasn't been caught watching scenes like that in a couple of months.

She refocuses on the present. Who cares about some two-bit wannabe hero who gotten off'd in his first Endbringer battle without even putting up a fight when this piece of work's right here?

“Good. Obey, and you’ll survive unharmed. Try to run, and you might live. Tell anyone about this or fight, and you won’t.” 

The photographer nods and settles into a resting position on an unbroken section of the roof. Is she shaking? Trembling?

“If you’re particularly well behaved, you might even get the picture of the Boogeyman you’ve been hunting.” 

“You?” she asks. 

She puts a finger to her mouth. There is blood on her fists, but it’s almost certainly not by accident. Almost. The photographer can’t say she isn’t intrigued, because she is. The light reflects off the fresh blood. The photographer imagines licking it off and can't help but flush. 

“It’s a mystery.”

This woman, this half-true Boogeyman, knows she likes those, how they tease her and how the strange presence in her skull draws hers to puzzle them out. The thinker’s dilemma. That smug half smile. She is strikingly beautiful, and the photographer knows, in the marrow of her bones, how best to capture her.

In film only. The photographer doesn’t believe for a moment that she could capture the woman any other way. 

“Your wish is my command,” she says, trying to smile like the woman in front of her, but it's as far from as distinguished as this cape is to vulnerable. There’s not much elegance to be found in the voyeurism of a girl on a rooftop. 

“Come,” the woman beckons, and it’s almost a question from the upturn of her pitch, but the implicit threat is there. This is a conflict, Eris’s power confirms, and it was one the photographer lost the moment the woman set her sites this way. Victory. That's her power. The photographer tries to keep the awe off her face, but her jaw drops and eyes widen involuntarily. “Fly if you want to.” 

She does, without the force of Alexandria. A softer flight, from a breaker form. Pelirosa, a Spanish cape who was a famous dancer before they triggered. They look so delicate, with their blurry edges, when seen at a distance, floating more than charging into space. She's like a cloud, and like a cloud, she storms. She's even graceful when she wraps her prey in wires, bouncing into the sky at high speeds, sometimes severing limbs fast enough for them to bleed out and sometimes dragging them with her before releasing them to fall to their death. The photographer doesn’t long for their grace. She is happiest at a distance. 

The pictures are an art. Both in her faded reflections of the powers that tear in strange, beautiful ways and in the simple majesty of her collection. 

The photographer drops the power, and then drops into a bow. 

When she rises back, the woman offers a hand to shake. The photographer might compare it to selling her soul to the Devil, if she doesn't consider that a bargain made the moment she’d manifested this strength inside her.

Besides, the Devil’s not this pretty.


End file.
